Rooftop tent
Also called RTT, roof top tent, hard shell tent, soft shell tent
A rooftop tent is a tent built into a rack-mounted shell that folds out on top of a vehicle's roof, trading a ground tent's setup effort and low centre of gravity for a sleeping platform off the wet ground, at a real cost in weight and drag carried exactly where a vehicle can least afford them.
What is a rooftop tent?
A tent bed mounted on a roof rack or crossbars, reached by a ladder, that unfolds into a sleeping platform above the vehicle rather than beside it. Two constructions dominate the market. A hard-shell tent lives inside a rigid clamshell, usually fibreglass, aluminium or ABS, that pops or lifts open in under a minute, often on gas struts, and folds back down just as fast. A soft-shell tent is a folding frame under a canvas or polyester cover that unfolds outward from the roof into a much larger footprint than a hard shell manages, at the cost of five to fifteen minutes of setup and pack-down instead of one.
iKamper, a maker of both, frames the trade the way most of the industry does: hard shells are durable, aerodynamic, and quick to set up and take down, while soft shells trade that speed for more usable floor space and typically a lower price.
What it costs the vehicle
Roof weight is the most expensive place to carry mass, for two separate reasons that compound. It raises the vehicle's centre of gravity, which worsens body roll and rollover margin, and it sits in the wind the whole time it is fitted, not just when it is occupied. Oak Ridge National Laboratory measured a rooftop cargo box costing an SUV about nine percent of its highway fuel economy at 60 mph; nobody we could find has run the same test on a rooftop tent specifically, but the shape and the mechanism are close enough that the direction of the result almost certainly carries over, even if the exact number on a given tent does not.
There is also a weight limit to respect before any of that, and it is not one number but two: most vehicles carry a static roof rating for what the roof can hold parked and a separate, lower dynamic rating for what it can carry safely while moving, and a rack plus a hard-shell tent can spend most of the dynamic figure before anyone climbs the ladder.
See also
Sources
- Hardshell vs. Softshell Roof Top Tent, iKamper, read 2026-09-24A rooftop tent maker's own comparison of the two constructions. iKamper sells hardshell tents, worth knowing when reading how the comparison is framed, though the material and setup-time descriptions match what other makers of both types say.
- ORNL study pegs fuel economy costs of common practices by John Thomas, Shean Huff and Brian West, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy, read 2026-09-24Published 9 April 2014. A national laboratory measured a rooftop cargo box costing an SUV about nine percent of its highway fuel economy at 60 mph. It did not test a rooftop tent specifically, and nobody we could find has published a measured drag or fuel-economy figure for one. The direction of the result carries across; the size of the number on a given tent does not.